My personal favorite walleye rods are built on the 5S60LF blank. You'll love them. Super light, super sensitive, especially when used with zero stretch line. Skip
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Rich, One consideration when selecting a tip ring size is whether you will be passing knots or slip bobber stops through the tip. Small rings like number 6 keep the tip light and sensitive while larger rings like 7's or 8's pass the knots better. As for the rest of the guides, I think it is more of an issue on spinning rods than on casting rods. On a spinning rod, the butt guide has to ge
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Greetings James, And welcome to the rod building hobby. I also fish in northwestern Wisconsin, mostly on the Chippewa Flowage. Walleye and crappie are my usual targets but it is not unusual to catch a few smallies and northerns along the way. I use first quality St Croix blanks and I think they are good blanks. I find that a MLF (Medium-Light, Fast) action in a 6' length works good f
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Greetings Kyle, From your subsequent posts, I see that you have built fly rods. I fish for crappies a lot and occasionally catch a few in the 12 -13" range, weighing over a pound. I use a 3S70ULF St Croix blank with spinning style guides and a spinning reel seat. The rod works great for whipping tiny jigs out a ways and handles the fish fighting just fine. The local guides and client
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Greetings Alan, Assuming you are building a fresh water spinning rod on a mdium or lighter blank, you'll want to keep the assembly as light as possible to maximize the sensitivity. Prepare the guide feet as others have suggested, avoid an underwrap unless you really need the aesthetics (it adds weight) and wrap the guides with "A" weight thread, again to keep the weight down. Ski
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One way to slow down the rod building urge temporarily is to build your own power wrapper. Your local sewing machine store is one source for a motor and speed controller. Buy a chuck from one of the suppliers that sponsor this site (I bought my renzetti chuck at Mud Hole) You can find suitable rollers for your rod supports at your local hardware store in the patio door repair section (or buy r
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I've always used the high build version of Flex Coat epoxy for my (very) basic rod building attempts. Now, I believe I've graduated to the point where I can reliably do more decorative wraps, including butt wraps and I'd like to get the glass-like epoxy results I've seen in the magazine and the photo library. Is there a mechanical or appearance advantage to using multiple coats of "thin&
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Martin, In my opinion, lightness equals senstivity when building rods. This of course applies to finesse rods like lighter freshwater rigs, not heavy surf and boat rods. With that in mind, I'd always go with the lightest thread I can use, D weight on heavy musky rods and A weight on the rest. Similarly, I try to keep the epoxy layers thin as well. I put it on thick enough so the individual
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Great! Thanks! I need to build a dryer box and thought that would be good place to get some ideas. Slip
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I looked through it once before, now can't find it. Skip
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Mike, I've seen an article somewhere (probably in Rodmaker) that describes a way to use a regular power drill and a couple of simple supports to make a "lathe" for turning cork handles. I've used the technique and have had great results. Basically, you shove an arbor into the butt end of the rod and connect the arbor to a drill which is clamped down in a vise (in my setup). The
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I use wine corks as fillers between the reel seat and the blank for my lighter weight spinning rods. I bore a 1/4" hole thru the center of the cork, then insert a mandrel (1/4" bolt and some washers). Then turn it down by filing it while spinning it in my drill press. It typically takes two corks per reel seat. Once the corks are the right OD, I epoxy them into the reel seat then re
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Tom, Thanks for the reply. I have been a subscriber to the magazine for several years and have kept the old copies. I'll certainly take your advice and go back through them looking for advice. I live on the Chippewa Flowage in NW Wisconsin. There are plenty of guides who work that lake and I'm sure that if I enlist a few of them, I can get a business started. I guess I'll do more home
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I've been building custom rods for myself and as gifts for 5 years (yeah, I have lots of rods and so do my friends ; ) Is there a place /publication where I can research the pro's and con's of building and selling custom rods? For example, what's a reasonable markup over the cost of components (i.e., labor)? What kind of warranty is expected / provided? How about including an "owner's
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Looking at the Fuji catalog of guides, I find several different materials listed. My goal is a walleye rod based on the St Croix 5S60LF blank. I feel that on a blank this light, the guides should also be light so as not to damp the action and sensitivity too much. I also feel that titanium framed guides are pretty pricy. Since I am building the "ultimate" rod for myself, what guide
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Aaron, I'm planning to build a spiral guide Musky rod as well. How have you set up your spiral guide spacing? Are you using 3 guides to make the transition (top, 90 degrees, bottom) or 4 guides set 60 degrees apart? How have you determined where the tip-most spiral guide is placed? What spacing do you use between the three or four transition guides? Hope I'm not being too nosy. If yo
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Peter, I've been building freshwater spinning rods for the past 6 years, all on St Croix blanks. I fish almost exclusively on the Chippewa Flowage in NW Wisconsin catching Walleye, Smallmouth, and Northerns primarily. I have experimanted with many SCII, SCIII, and now, SCV blanks and have found the "perfect" blank for the freshwater gamefish I mentioned. I've settled on the SC
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Steve, If you are planning to build, repair, or finish those half completed rods, you may want to hang on to the thread yourself. Rod wrapping thread is nylon and certainly can be used for sewing where the standard cotton or rayon thread just won't do but I'll bet you find that conventional sewing threads are a lot less expensive per spool than your nylon stuff. Also, if any of your collecti
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Greetings Lon, I am in the process of building a couple of these myself, primarily for Musky fishing. There are two great articles in recent issues of Rodmaker Magazine and a section in Dale Clemen's rod building book. The summary is that you do indeed address the spine when building one of these rods. The whole idea is to use this method to eliminate the torque you experience when figh
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My local tackle building store is great but . . . . they only handle the St Croix line of rod blanks. I've built multiple rods on several models of this brand and have settled on one in particular for making exceptional walleye jigging rods. Now, I am getting requests from other fishermen to build rods for them. Many want duplicates on "my" walleye rod but others have different req
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This is my first post in this great forum so please excuse any newbue mistakes. I've been building rods for several years, mostly for my own use and have not experienced the following epoxy problems until recently. The epoxy on the guide wraps on my two most recent rods is cracking and separating from the threads where the sharp angle occurs as the thread passes over the edge of the foot.
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